It seem as though each day is better than the next when it
comes to new product announcements here at CES -- especially when it comes to
the hot field of SSDs. Everyone is in a game of one-upmanship, with Micron
announcing its 415/260 (read/write) RealSSD
C400 on Tuesday and Corsair announcing its 480/320 Performance
3 Series yesterday.

Now it's OCZ's turn to blow everyone out the water with its
new Vertex 3 Pro. The Vertex 3 Pro is based on SandForce's SF-2582 SATA III/6Gbps compliant controller, and delivers read speeds of a whopping
550MB/sec and write speeds of an almost equally blazing 525MB/sec.

When paired with a SATA III controller, the real world
numbers are equally impressive. Anand
Shimpi of AnandTech was able to record
a maximum of 492MB/sec sequential read and 518MB/sec sequential write using a
prototype drive.

"Performance may even increase by the time OCZ actually
ships the drive," said Shimpi. "Furthermore, this is the performance
of a single drive with a single controller - there’s no funny on-board RAID
going on, we’re just talking about the performance of a single drive."

The Vertex 3 Pro SSDs will be available in capacities
ranging from 64GB to 512GB. We'll get your some up close and personal pictures
of the SSDs (and hopefully a word on pricing) later today.

"Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" -- Homer Simpson